Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Further information on the theme is available at: https://one-ocean-science-2025.org/programme/themes.html#T2

Blue tourism holds significant potential to drive sustainable development, protect marine ecosystems, and support local livelihoods. However, poorly managed tourism can strain fragile ecosystems and deepen socio-economic inequalities. Among its most pressing challenges is overtourism, which places pressure on oceans, leading to pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. Particularly, the rapid and often unregulated growth of cruise tourism stands out. Concentrating large numbers of visitors in ecologically sensitive areas, cruise tourism exacerbates these impacts, often offering limited benefits to local communities. This event aims to take stock of the scientific literature on the impacts of tourism on society and environment, and foster dialogue on policy pathways towards sustainability. Tourism is a large and rapidly growing ocean economy sector with large impacts on coastal ecosystem services including small scale fisheries. Can it be turned into a driver of restoration and sustainability?
Participants from diverse coastal regions (e.g. Mediterranean, Europe, Caribbean, Western Indian Ocean) will explore research insights and sustainable practices, emphasising the need to strengthen connections between science, policy, and practice. A core objective is to align scientific insights with policymaking and practical actions. Science offers critical evidence to understand tourism's impacts and design sustainable frameworks, yet its integration into policy is often limited. By convening researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society representatives, this event provides a platform to inform actionable solutions. Themes will include mitigating cruise tourism's socio-environmental impacts and advancing governance models that balance economic growth with ecosystem preservation. Interactive presentations and panel discussions will enable stakeholders to share experiences, identify commonalities, and develop cross-regional solutions. Participants will highlight best practices and propose innovative approaches to enhance decision-making, creating a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient blue tourism sector.
This event’s value lies in catalysing collaborations, fostering partnerships, and generating actionable recommendations. A policy brief will translate discussions into practical guidelines, promoting stronger connections between research, policies, and practices. By advancing this critical dialogue, the event offers a unique opportunity for stakeholders to co-create solutions that balance economic development, environmental preservation, and community well-being.

As climate change continues to have profound impacts on the oceans, there is an urgent need for solutions and reliable indicators to assess these effects on marine ecosystems and extreme events. The ocean plays a pivotal role in regulating the Earth’s climate, absorbing over 90% of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions and acting as a significant carbon sink. Consequently, understanding the changes in oceanic conditions is crucial not only for monitoring the health of marine ecosystems but also for forecasting and mitigating extreme events such as marine heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and coastal flooding.
Data from the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) underpins our understanding of the ocean’s role in climate regulation, ecosystem dynamics, weather and extreme events. Yet, in most countries, this critical infrastructure does not have identified and sustained funding support and collectively we face critical gaps in observational coverage—particularly in areas that we need to navigate a sustainable future, biodiversity, carbon, arctic, and deep-sea regions. A robust and sustainable global ocean observing system provides critical earth information for accurate climate modelling, disaster preparedness, and sustainable, evidence-based decision-making. Combining satellite technologies with in-situ observations, forecast models, and digital twins of the ocean, as an integrated support system that delivers essential data services for governments worldwide is also needed, however long-term investment into such collaboration falls short of what is required. Leveraging initiatives such as the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), and World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) offers opportunities to clearly identify and close these gaps.
The growing societal demand for comprehensive ocean information across diverse economic sectors highlights the need for a shift from sector-specific observation systems to holistic approaches. These new approaches should incorporate economic and societal parameters alongside traditional environmental data, such as ocean temperature, sea level, and carbon content.
A crucial element of this transition will be to include cost effeecitve and innovative technologies, such as autonomous sensors and platforms, citizen science, and participatory observation systems. These components are essential to enhance coverage in under-observed regions and provide real-time data for early-warning systems aimed at mitigating the risks of extreme ocean and weather events.

The design, coordination, and implementation of a comprehensive observing system—one that integrates multiple stakeholders, disciplines, and themes—require a thoughtful and strategic approach.
This involves:
Outlining a roadmap for expanding and consolidating existing observation frameworks to include a focus on extreme events and their impacts.
Incorporating observatories that monitor ecosystems, societal impacts, and economic parameters, alongside traditional physical variables, to capture the multifaceted nature of climate-driven changes.
Ensuring the feasibility and efficient implementation of the proposed system, by aligning resources and fostering collaboration between governmental agencies, research institutions, and civil society.
Identifying priority areas for pilot systems and demonstrators to validate methodologies, ensure scalability, and refine predictive models that link ocean dynamics to atmospheric and socio-economic extremes.

The Third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC 3) is a key moment for updating the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 14 in relation to those of the Kunming-Montreal Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Target 3 of the GBF, known as the 30x30 objective, aims to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas, but importantly also sets out essential qualitative elements that must be considered. Protected and conserved areas must be effectively managed, equitably governed and must achieve positive outcomes for biodiversity.

The IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas Standard is recognized and promoted by the CBD and the Barcelona Convention as a voluntary standard to measure protected area management effectiveness, contributing also to SDG 14. The associated Green List certification provides an independently assessed means of identifying those sites that meet the Green List Standard. As an evidence-based system, it helps protected and conserved areas improve or establish management plans, backed by guidance and metrics for governance, ecological integrity, long-term adaptive management strategy, . To date, 95 sites have been Green Listed, from 18 countries, while 379 sites from 48 countries are formally engaged in the certification process; in addition, many sites around the world are using the IUCN Green List Standard to improve their management and governance.

This session will present the Green List Standard, highlighting how it can streamline best practice to improve the management effectiveness of MPAs, but also of networks of marine protected and conserved areas, and provide a common reference to report on the qualitative elements of the CBD GBF Target 3. Case studies will illustrate the diversity of its application. The intended audience is the marine protected and conserved areas community as a whole, including representatives of governments, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples Organizations, researchers, the private sector and civil society.

The plenary discussion will enable panelists together with the audience to formulate draft recommendations for the “Nice Ocean Action Plan” on how the Green List Standard and associated certification programme can be promoted as a common framework to assess current MPA management effectiveness, guide improvement pathways towards an international standard, and support reporting against global goals such as SDG14 and CBD T3.

The proposed town hall will first highlight diverse and inclusive capacity development strategies employed by the UN Ocean Decade endorsed Early Career Ocean Professionals Programme (ECOP Programme). We shall share the lessons learned from the past four years and discuss recommendations for further cooperative actions. In the second part of the town hall, moderated open discussion with the audience, the event will discuss current gaps in achieving better inclusivity, specifically funding gaps for certain geographies, inclusion of underrepresented communities, and challenges for the successful uptake of capacity development opportunities. We will touch upon geopolitical, intergenerational, and intersectoral aspects of inclusivity, and discuss ways to amplify the voices of those often underrepresented in high-level discussions. We will review DEI tools that can be used in capacity development activities, such as inclusive language, assertive communication, and consideration of cultural background. As a UN Ocean Decade programme working with and for ECOPs, with over 6,000 members across over 160 countries, we are in a unique position to share the voices and perspectives of these professionals to ensure more effective and inclusive ocean policies and solutions for all.

All our speakers, chairperson, and moderators are ECOPs. The moderators are included in the list of suggested speakers. Although it is problematic to confirm anyone’s participation almost 6 months before the Congress, we have done our best to ensure that the suggested list is geographically diverse. Currently, the list of our speakers, chairperson, and moderators features nationals of Ireland, Switzerland, El Salvador, Morocco, Canada, and Russia, however we expect that representatives of the different ECOP Programme nodes and task teams of many other nationalities will be involved as speakers from the audience in the moderated second section of the town hall. If the application is successful, we will ensure even broader representation of nationalities.

Our target audience will be ECOPs and established professionals, working in the capacity development field, such as training providers, interested in identifying ways to solve related capacity development challenges. We also welcome anyone interested in sharing their experiences related to barriers and inclusivity challenges in capacity development and career growth within the ocean sciences.

This town hall strives to share the successes of the ECOP Programme in their capacity development work and aims to find innovative and efficient solutions to address specific challenges related to capacity development/sharing. By ensuring an inclusive, international, and intersectoral atmosphere, we aim for an impactful and meaningful event by supplying concrete suggestions for further capacity development. The moderated open discussion will provide some successful examples of solving capacity development challenges by highlighting stories from our worldwide experience. The audience will be invited to share their experiences and learn new ways for creating opportunities that are truly inclusive. The open discussion will be highly interactive and action-oriented. This will result in a post-event report with a set of recommendations and actionable strategies that will feed into UNOC3 discussions.

Climate change is already producing significant impacts on marine ecosystems and their fisheries. Distributional, productivity, body size, and seasonality changes are already presenting challenges for stock assessment and management processes, with implications for the effectiveness of management decisions. Given that a significant proportion of marine fish stocks are already overexploited (FAO 2024), climate-driven impacts put at risk the long-term sustainability of fisheries resources, their supporting ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them.

There is broad agreement that adaptations to the consequences of climate change in fisheries management are urgently needed, but examples of climate-adaptive fisheries management are rare. The reasons for this are diverse, including that: stock assessment models rely on principles of stationarity and fixed population model parameters; climate change projections have a mismatch of scales with stock assessment and management decisions; fisheries advisers may find a challenge to include future scenarios that are subject to large uncertainties, while managers would have to consider the legal implications of decisions that could be contested; and shifting distributions of transboundary species that require new data collection, monitoring, assessments and international cooperation and coordination.

This town hall will explore how to incorporate climate change projections in fisheries management by discussing three overarching questions: What are the expected impacts that we need to consider? How can stock assessments incorporate these impacts and their associated uncertainties, which may be significant? And what flexibility can be introduced into the fisheries management cycle in order to foster adaptation and strengthen fisheries resilience?

The ultimate objective of this town hall is to broaden a community of action on climate-adaptive fisheries management, to foster discussions on how current and emerging scientific research can address key questions, and gather best practice principles, opportunities, and guiding examples. This discussion will contribute to objectives of sustainability, equitability, and safety of ocean-based food systems as well as effectiveness, equitability, and safety of ocean-based approaches to climate change adaptation, thereby contributing to broader goals of the conference. The target audience for this townhall will be intentionally cross-cutting, bridging disciplines and stakeholder groups, including experts (e.g. climate-change, fisheries), practitioners and managers (e.g. fisheries bodies), and policymakers.

The event is being co-organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the FishMIP consortium, with assistance from the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER).

The ocean covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface and acts as a vast storehouse for both carbon dioxide and heat, amongst providing other ecosystem services vital to humanity. Whilst climate change is imperilling marine life, the ocean is increasingly recognised as being a key ally in the fight against climate change. Marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is a relatively novel ocean-based solution to climate change that has potentially huge mitigation potential, but is also controversial because of social and environmental concerns.

In this townhall session, we will present the findings of a new Blue Paper, commissioned by the Ocean Panel, on the ethical and effective development and deployment of mCDR approaches. Authors of the Blue Paper will present:
1) A review of status of current mCDR technologies, including their efficacy, cost, scalability, potential social and environmental impacts, and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) needs.
2) A review of national and international governance considerations for mCDR, such as the application of the London Protocol and Convention.
3) A new, government-focused, Code of Conduct for the development and deployment of mCDR techniques.

Following this presentation, Peter Haugan will chair an open, candid, discussion on the three aspects above, with a particular focus on the content of the new Code of Conduct. The discussion will include contributions from the Blue Paper authors, Ocean Panel government representatives, and audience members.

The intended audience for this townhall session consists of scientists (with a particular focus on those working at the science/policy interface), and representatives of government and industry. Key outcomes include:
• Socialising the new mCDR Code of Conduct
• Facilitating constructive dialogue on its value and implications
• Advancing consensus among the scientific and policy communities of the place of mCDR as a responsible mitigation measure for climate change, ahead of the UN Ocean Conference.

In recent years, the critical role the ocean plays in the Earth’s life-support system, as well as its importance for the sustainable development of our societies and economies has been increasingly recognised, and emphasised at the highest political levels. An adequately funded, sustained, and truly global ocean observing system is essential to support informed decision-making, in the context of policy frameworks such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. It is also critical to the success of global assessments, such as the UN Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment, including Socioeconomic Aspects (or “Regular Process”) and the upcoming International Panel for Ocean Sustainability (IPOS).

More than ever, it is critical that the world’s governments prioritise funding of ocean observations and their coordination at the global level, to complete a comprehensive Global Ocean Observation System (GOOS), covering all aspects, and at the granularity required for accurate forecasts. Full planned deployment of GOOS has slowed in the last decade, hampered by fragile long-term funding arrangements. While a global system for measuring physical Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) - and to a lesser extent chemical EOVs- is in place (albeit with geographical gaps and fragile funding), biological and ecosystem observations for monitoring the health of our ocean have yet to be operationalised.

The proposed Town Hall will bring together members of the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) - Directors of oceanographic research institutes from around the world- to discuss the urgent need for sustained, global ocean observations to support global policy frameworks and assessments, the current funding landscape, possible new models for sustainable, long-term funding, and the return on investment to be gained from ocean observations and the information they provide in support of sustainable development.

The world coastal zones are suffering numerous hazards of natural and anthropogenic origin. These include climate-related extreme events, sea level rise and ground subsidence, causing temporary and permanent flooding, coastal erosion and retreat, aquifer salinization, loss of biodiversity, etc. With the development of a large variety of advanced sensors aboard satellites, and the growing amount of available data, space-based Earth Observations (EOs) are increasingly being used to better support hazard monitoring, mitigation, adaptation and risk management. The EO datasets provide human society with the benefits of a synoptic view of natural hazards and their associated risks. The purpose of this Town Hall is to bring together scientists and stakeholders from different horizons involved in different aspects of coastal geohazards and their impacts on society and the environment, and exchange about the benefit of using Earth Observation data to monitor coastal changes due to natural phenomena and anthropogenic forcing factors as well as associated impacts on populations, environment and infrastructures. Gaps in knowledge and in observational systems will be identified and perspectives of improvement will be discussed. Another objective is to address opportunities of collaborations between the international scientific community, local research institutes, national and intergovernmental agencies, and the private sector for developing a global effort directed to monitor changes affecting the world coastlines and the associated risks, using a broad variety of space observations -combined with in situ data where available and high-resolution modeling-. Such an ambitious programme would be an invaluable first step towards mitigation and adaptation.

The global Argo program has demonstrated that mass autonomy can enable highly efficient global and realtime subsurface ocean monitoring. Argo's open data architecture strengthens equity in ocean knowledge and research, and underpins many societally important services. OneArgo is a proposed ambitious expansion of Argo to include the full ocean depth, the polar seas and to monitor ocean chemistry, carbon and plankton parameters. If implemented, OneArgo will enable and improve a large range of new ocean, climate and carbon prediction and knowledge services. We will discuss the present status of the international OneArgo effort, its potential future impacts and a call for action to implement it by 2030.

Blue Energy: Global and Local Pathways for Ocean Energy Innovation explores the expanding frontier of ocean-based renewable energy and its role in shaping a sustainable future. As the global community strengthens efforts toward energy transition, ocean energy—including wave, tidal, ocean thermal energy conversion, and offshore wind—becomes more attractive as a clean, reliable, and energy-dense source.
This town hall meeting will bring together diverse perspectives to discuss the global outlook and local realities of ocean energy progress. We will begin with a global vision, offering insights into the current status of ocean energy technologies, environmental benefits, and the role of international cooperation through platforms like the IEA Ocean Energy Systems (IEA-OES). Next, we will present Costa Rica’s local case, highlighting its wave energy potential, societal challenges, and academic and institutional efforts to advance ocean energy and integrate it into its grid. Finally, we will explore how cutting-edge academic research drives innovation to make ocean energy more feasible, scalable, and impactful.
Participants will gain a deeper understanding of how global strategies and local actions can converge to unlock ocean energy's potential, advancing a resilient and inclusive blue energy future.

The UN Ocean Decade Programme for Blue Carbon in the Global Ocean (GO-BC), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC-UNESCO) propose to co-host a Townhall Meeting to promote the fundamental values of science (biogeochemistry, ecology, oceanography, etc.) which are increasingly required to deliver the evidence that underpins policy change, supports a just transition, and creates credible and emergent nature-based solutions (and markets for finance) that are necessary to achieve meaningful and lasting ocean solutions.

A science-focused dialogue on blue carbon opportunities and challenges will be particularly timely at OOS2025, demonstrating how blue carbon initiatives can benefit climate, people, and nature.

This Townhall Meeting will bring together leading blue carbon researchers and supports a growing interest in blue carbon science among the UN Ocean community - reflected in a growing number of scientific publications, science-based ocean actions, and the emergent nature restoration markets that are underpinned by blue carbon evidence.

Panelists will be solicited widely to ensure that the dialogue captures and articulates (i) the ethos and value of fundamental scientific research; (ii) the need to support (and fund) blue skies research; (iii) the value of investment in early career researchers as future ocean leaders; (iv) the opportunities and added value of engaging local communities (and youth) as meaningful project research partners; (v) the need for regional knowledge hubs to be established and to share best practice and scientific skills to build in-country capacity and knowledge; and (vi) the growing need for an ocean science community who understand and are prepared to engage with policy makers and others to effect fundamental changes in the management of our seas.

All are welcome (science , media, and policy); refreshments will be provided.